Interestingly, they attribute the additional productivity to the fact that their telework employees are simply working more hours:
> “It doesn’t matter to me where your eight-, 10-, 12-hour day is, but as long as we’re getting coverage from that perspective,” Rivera said.
> While some federal managers have expressed skepticism with telework productivity, Deputy CIO Luis Campudoni said employees are, if anything, putting in longer hours than they normally would working in the office.
> “From an eight-hour workday that you would normally experience in the office, now, without asking the workforce, certainly get 10-12 hours of work done on a daily basis. It’s because of that flexibility, people appreciate that,” Campudoni said.
I would also expect productivity to go up if everyone was working 25-50% more hours under the new system. I don't know if that's sustainable though. If these jobs are paid hourly and the extra hours aren't mandatory then the employees aren't necessarily getting a bad deal. However, if the extra hours are unpaid or the 12-hour days become mandatory, this could fall apart fast.
I know where I currently am, my hours have smeared to cross 12 hours of the day. I have meetings as early as 8 AM, and as late as 7 PM, routinely (sometimes even later). That's to accommodate people in other timezones.
But, my middle of the day is oftentimes empty. I'll use that time to go out to a botanical garden, or play a game, or work on personal pursuits, or nap.
It's hard to say whether I'm more productive or not; I changed jobs mid-pandemic and so I don't have much to compare to (and I left my prior job because I was bored; I'm a manager, and wasn't feeling productive, but that's because everything I was empowered to change I had running so smoothly it didn't need my attention, and all I was doing was small boring implementation stuff so the team could have the interesting work).
But I can say that the extra hours aren't really helpful toward being productive (and that I've taken steps to keep them from being harmful). So I'm not sure that people doing stuff across 12 hours of the day really equates to 12 hours of work.
We're literally talking about hundreds of millions of people here, so pretty much any universal statement is going to be wrong.
There's nothing wrong with either of those motivations, but often the WFH versus office debate is a smoke screen for one of them.
For example, your post seems to assume that wfh aptitude is a fixed quality of each worker. But after more discussion, it seems clear that the home office environment is a major consideration as well.
Some people despise work-from-home in it's current manifestation, but might not hate it at all if they could rent a quiet coworking space near their gym or something. Instead everybody's stuck at home, so the people who don't necessarily enjoy being at home all day are losing their minds.
I've seen gradual, but sustained improvement in WFH skills.
For example, teleconferencing skills. People have learned to share their screens, then people gradually adapted to have an agenda on-screen to show and step through, people figured out how to send links and files during a meeting. Even silly stuff like how to contact someone who forgot about a meeting.
And some of it is more democratized. Regular folks are figuring out how to do peer-to-peer meetings, which were normally organized and driven by managers. This also goes for other tools like wiki, shared documents, teams, calendars, email, slack.
Another thing is a gradual spool up of WFH support. It took a while for people to figure out a webcam that works, or a microphone or headset. Or a chair, or a room setup, or just a rhythm.
Yes, there are adjustments and downsides, but net net, I feel a lot more confident that my team are being heard and no one is overlooked because of social tendencies, etc.
What the last year has done was to force knee-jerk 'butts in seats' mentality managers to experiment with remote work. It sure seems like the bottom line results haven't proven remote work to be a failure, and while some old timers may force everyone back to the office, I think many are going to be a lot more open to remote work where they never would've considered it in the pre-pandemic era.
It works very well for 80% of the positions at my company. I'm sure there are companies for which it only works for a small percentage. The ultimate YMMV.
According to who?
That means I get productive more quickly and thus more productive. In the last year I was able to pick up a lot of technologies that I've been putting off for years because I couldn't find quiet time to sit down and bang my head against the documentation.
WFH is either the greatest thing ever, or the worst, depending on many factors(kids, quiet space, your need for socialization, your career positioning, etc).
WFH part time is either the greatest thing ever or the worst, depending on if you need to maintain an extra office and remain living in an expensive tech hub.
If teleworking works for your company, great keep doing it! If it doesn't, don't do it. And lets not demonize when a company makes a decision that is right for them in their particular case.
For our company, we've made the decision to not allow teleworking, and it is only approved temporarily on a strict case by case basis. I think it has helped our work culture and productivity over the many years.
When I hear folks complain about the pains of working from home, what I often hear are their stories about how they were needlessly disruptive to their coworkers.
Having impromptu hallway meetings mean that your peers, and subordinates, must keep an ear open for such events should they risk being left out of important decision making processes.
Having watercooler conversations means that your office-mates must take effort to overcome their human desire for social communication in order to focus on their task at hand.
And so on.
Generally, I find having a team that works wholly remote means that we schedule communications clearly and are able to maintain the focus on our work before us.
Right now my team is comprised of no one that I've met in person. I feel absolutely no connection to them and feel so incredibly disconnected from my work. Like I've been playing the same video game for 8 hours a day for a year and nothing I'm doing is real.
I'm quite scared of hybrid or full remote solutions for my company. I don't want to switch companies right now but if they go full or hybrid WFH I might have to, just to keep my sanity.
But _anyone_ can mute those and focus. I _cannot_ mute a coworker talking loudly next to my desk.
I do my job, my coworkers do their job, and then we can close our laptops at the end of the day and engage with our lives and not think about each other.
Do you do regular video calls? Do you ever discuss anything aside from work? Even during a "work" discussion, do people make jokes, laugh, etc?
Do you have chat (slack) channels, and are they active? Does anyone ever spontaneously post something like "hey, anyone feel like talking about x that I'm trying to sort out?" Is chat pure business or do people ever discuss anything else?
These are all kind of leading questions, but the things that I think are key to making it work.
What I hear are complaints about the consequences of the pandemic. That people have to work and babysit their kids during school. That both they and their partner are forced to share a workspace. That they miss changes of scenery, or that their home workspace isn't adequate enough to get work done.
Before the pandemic, I would regularly rotate venues for where I got my work done. I'd go to different coffee shops and libraries. If I got bored of those places, I'd make it a point to go into different venues in different neighborhoods. When it was nice and warm out, I'd get work done in beach towns and enjoy the sea breeze. Several times a year, I'd book a hotel or short-term rental and work from a completely different city. At one point I rented a co-working space.
During the pandemic, most of those places are closed. I can't travel, and I don't want to. If I want to enjoy the sea breeze, I better have enough battery life and reception to get my work done in a park. Yet I'm lucky in that I'm not forced to share my personal work space at home with others, and I'm not forced to be a babysitter on top of the job I'm paid to do.
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/quarantine-work-is-not-remote...
If the only place you have to set up your workspace is your kitchen table then yeah, that sucks hard. But most people I know living in tiny bachelor suites and stuff where this becomes necessary are doing so because that was what they could get/afford a reasonable distance from the office.
If your WFH transitions to permanent, then you can solve this. You don't need that downtown suite anymore. If enough people transition to WFH to take the pressure off of the downtown rental market, then even if you _want_ to stay downtown chances are you can get more space pretty cheaply.
If you don't have a proper desk, enough monitors, a good chair, or other equipment... That's basically a one time cost if you transition to WFH. Bug your employer to pay for it or let you take home some of the now unused office equipment. I know for me I've saved over $15k in the past year not having to go downtown. I can buy a new Herman Miller chair basically every month and throw the old one in the trash and still be breaking even.
How so (rhetorically asked)?
> That both they and their partner are forced to share a workspace. That they miss changes of scenery, or that their home workspace isn't adequate enough to get work done.
These all seem like problems that arise from WFH. Especially two people working from home. Inadequate workspace and isolation at home.
> Before the pandemic, I would regularly rotate venues for where I got my work done. I'd go to different coffee shops and libraries.
Yeah, if you can work from a coworking space (either formal or informal) that solves quite a few of those problems. That's different. Although I don't want to subsidize my employer's office rent, but I'm happy to direct their funds to a location I prefer.
The other point I note is that you work on a laptop. You talk about taking it with you and other clues. How do you work on a small screen, touchpad, and a laptop keyboard. I'm honestly curious, because I've tried it many times and there must be some tricks I need to start employing. The lack of dual screens alone seems like it would kill productivity. (And sea air seems like it would kill your electronics.)
I'm not sure I'm that enthusiastic about it anymore. Life just seems a lot more boring to me. Every day is the same and it's become incredibly repetitive. I've been getting somewhat depressed about having this repetitive lifestyle for the next N years. I hadn't really felt this way before. It could be unrelated to remote work of course.
The pandemic is a poor facsimile of remote work. Iow, working from home to quarantine is fundamentally not the same as remote work.
In remote work, you can grab lunch with a friend, have a beer after work, or meet your grandparents. These things matter.
Pre-pandemic I lasted only 4 months at a remote job. I kept asking to meet them (they were in Atlanta, me in Long Island, but most of them were scattered), meeting stakeholders in person gives me a charge which aids my focus and overall productivity. Anyway they kept deferring, and then one day sort of out of the blue and without warning (literally... the day prior the supervisor's supervisor did a call with me and it went well), the supervisor and a longstanding coworker both just started grilling me hard and when they didn't like my answers (note that I was still learning the very complex application codebase at this point) the supervisor basically decided it's not working out.
This past year has terrified me with the idea that all tech work will now be done remotely. Fortunately I'm working on my own projects directly for clients but unfortunately it's not paying very well at the rate I'm being productive (which is "not very"). I am FAR more productive when working physically with other people (who also know intuitively when to not interrupt because they're also programmers).
Have you often worked on teams where everyone intuitively knows when to not interrupt someone?
Every office I've ever worked in has always had people who interrupt me while I'm trying to focus. If you've got a way to exclusively hire mind-readers that can effectively avoid this, I'm curious to hear how you've managed it.
The first year was concerning because it was different and weird, but it rapidly became normal. Now, I reflect on how _slow_ office work was and find myself frustrated for my past self.
Even so, it has never been nearly as disruptive and distracting as any office I have previously worked in.
"From an eight-hour workday that you would normally experience in the office, now, without asking the workforce, certainly get 10-12 hours of work done on a daily basis. It’s because of that flexibility, people appreciate that,”...
Employees are working 50% more. That's why it's "more productive".
Personally, I'm at my desk way earlier, and way later than I should be. It's hard to disconnect when everything is still there. The time I spent on commuting is now spent working - rather than on a hobby and such. I'm certain I'm not the only one, and sure maybe some of you can "disconnect" and get more time to yourself or your family. Statistics from my employer (a very large multinational) says the same, too. Emails getting sent more on off hours, people logged in more.
But these things do seem to matter to those who are just starting career, or have ambition to grow in current place by going beyond doing assigned tasks.
But likely the primary reason they were able to scale up so rapidly was that in the midst of a pandemic, there were millions of workers looking for jobs and after the twin impacts of the Great Recession and the pandemic in less than a decade, a much larger cohort who were likely more predisposed towards the safety of a government job than pretty much anytime in the past half century.
(1) a traditional in-office, no WFH environment and a smaller profit, OR (2) a partial/full WFH setup and a larger profit,
my gut sense (I can't back it up) is that a huge percentage of businesses would forgo profit for the psychological benefit of seeing their employees daily. Maybe it makes them feel more in control, or more important, or just loneliness.
Maybe this is how we revitalize towns that were wiped out by outsourcing the labor pool (read China manufacturing)?
I mean that literally, does actual data matter? The data in support of telecommuting has been around for years if you want to find it, heck you even pay employees less in some circumstances as they can live in lower COL areas (plus cost savings in fewer offices/smaller offices/rental instead of ownership/etc).
But the reality is that a certain type of employee rises through the ranks: Those who have a strong aptitude towards interpersonal connection (i.e. extraverts). They're also a loud[er] group. They benefit more from in-person than telecommuting, and they also often make the decisions.
Do you really expect a group of decision makers, who gained power via their interpersonal skills, wanting to give up that skill advantage and potential turn their business into a meritocracy?
COVID was a rare blip, because it tipped the scales just enough to make their position untenable, but in five years I do not anticipate any broad change in landscape. Heck even before a lot of people had a chance to get vaccinated many businesses are RUSHING back into the office, why? The same inexplicable reason we're there to begin with.
People would rather talk than write, on average.
tpsreport-final-final-iralymenit-fianly-freds-changes.xlst
Seems to be really hard - let alone doing minutes and action points correctly
Companies that do this will be at a distinct advantage over companies that rely on informal, ad-hoc, in-person conversations. There are many companies that have been started during the pandemic that are remote first and have the process to back it up. I don't think in-person companies can compete between lack of access to talent, undocumented communication, office politics, employee stress and fatigue due to commuting, living in a high cost of living area and the previously mentioned politics...
I'd also say a lot of management is actually unneeded, which also comes to light in remote first companies.
